


Wartime Interlude

by a_walking_shadow



Category: Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-09 18:24:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20999303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_walking_shadow/pseuds/a_walking_shadow
Summary: September, 1997. The Second Wizarding War against Lord Voldemort is in full swing. Harry Potter and his friends are on the run, the situation at Hogwarts worsens by the day, and the Muggle-Born Registration Commission has been steadily expanding its power and influence over the citizens of magical Britain.In a safe house in London, Liv Chenka and Helen Sinclair- a pair of muggleborn witches doing their damndest to make life difficult for, well, pretty much everybody- take a moment to reflect on the war, and their place within it.





	Wartime Interlude

**Author's Note:**

> Ravenous 4 happened, I had emotions about Liv and Helen, and here we are. You shouldn't need more than a basic understanding of the circumstances of HP book 7 in order to follow this story. 
> 
> Basically: in this AU, Liv and Helen are muggleborn witches. They were both in Ravenclaw at Hogwarts, although they didn't know each other. Before the war, Liv was a healer at St Mungo's and Helen worked in Ancient Runes for the magical side of the British Museum. The Doctor is a pureblood with a nice, dimensionally-trancendental townhouse (although he doens't appear personally in this story.) All of them are currently obstructing Voldemort and his puppet ministry at every opportunity.   
The Eleven has very little to do with this story- he's generally a nasty person but he got caught up in a Death Eater raid, and ended up helping out the Doctor et al, so now he's stuck with them. He probably regrets it. 
> 
> ... you guys have no idea how long I spent trying to make some kind of comment about "Death Eaters" and "Ravenous", but I eventually decided it would be too complicated...

‘Liv? Are you down here?’

Helen’s voice echoes slightly in the corridors, and she forces herself not to flinch at the sound. They’re safe here, tucked behind the ancient wards of the Doctor’s home, but the knowledge of exactly what is happening beyond these walls means that even here, her instincts are to keep her head down and her voice to a whisper.

Liv probably wouldn’t see the point, but Helen is not Liv.

There’s no response, so after a few moments, she continues down the passageway, her wand clasped tightly in her fist, the faint _lumos_ glowing at its tip the only light source in the area. She’s underground, and has been for a while- far deeper than the basement in a London townhouse should go. She’s travelled too far horizontally, too, but then again, the magical world has never cared overmuch about simple things like geometry and physics. If the Doctor wanted a home that stretched over what sometimes felt like all of downtown London, then he could- and did- make one.

‘Liv?’ She calls again, wondering if she’s come the wrong way. They’re far from the only people staying here- the Doctor doesn’t seem to have an actual job, and is instead spending his days smuggling muggleborns and half-bloods out of the country, many of whom end up staying here for a time. They tend to stick to the main living areas, though, and Liv- well, Liv’s healer training comes in handy for a lot of the new arrivals, so she doesn’t tend to wander too far. These corridors have been used recently, though, and she thinks she can see movement ahead.

Sure enough, she rounds the corner to find her friend slumped against one of the walls, exhausted. She straightens up quickly, though, giving Helen a smile which looks surprisingly sincere, given the circumstances. Helen’s about to smile back when she realises what Liv’s been watching, and sighs. ‘You’re still worried about him?’

There’s a door opposite Liv, leading out onto a small balcony overlooking a library- the third one Helen’s seen in this place so far. Their latest “rescue” is pacing in the middle of the room, muttering to himself, and completely ignoring the bookshelves towering around him.

‘He tried to kill us’, Liv points out.

‘He also saved our lives from the Death Eaters.’ Helen doesn’t like him very much either, honestly, but Liv has hated the man for years now, and she doesn’t seem to want to believe that he could have changed. At all. Given the kind of hellscape their world has recently devolved into, Helen herself finds it a bit more believable that someone might have had a change of heart.

Liv just shakes her head, and returns her gaze to the figure. She looks tired, Helen realises. Liv’s face still bears the bruises of her last trip to Diagon Alley, and she keeps a vice-like grip on her wand. Letting the enemy into their safehouse can’t have helped her in the slightest.

Said enemy, apparently noticing he has an audience, shoots Helen a decidedly unfriendly smile before returning to his pacing.

‘The Doctor doesn’t really want to keep him here, either’, Helen offers. ‘We just need to find somewhere that he can recuperate, then he’ll be on his way.’

‘Yeah. Pity that Azkaban’s out of the question right now, what with the insane dictator controlling it and all.’

‘Liv!’

‘You’re telling me he doesn’t deserve it?’

‘I’m pretty sure no one deserves Azkaban’, she murmurs. ‘And he says he’s cured, remember? Throwing him in that place certainly wouldn’t help.’

‘Is he, really.’ Liv lets herself drop to the ground, swinging her legs over the edge of the balcony and angling her body so that she can watch both Helen and the Eleven at the same time. It looks like quite an uncomfortable angle, so Helen takes pity on her, and joins her by the edge.

‘He says he’s cured’, Liv mutters. ‘But you don’t cure a psychopath, at least not overnight. I refuse to believe that he woke up one morning and decided he no longer wanted to murder everybody, that just doesn’t make sense. Let alone whatever else was going on in his head.’

‘So we take him somewhere to recover’, Helen promises.

‘Where? St Mungo’s? You know what my old co-workers would do if I turned up with him.’

Helen does. The pureblood healers at St Mungo’s would drag Liv before their new lord in chains. The rest of them would kill her themselves, because she healed both sides of this war when they turned up in her emergency ward. And the Eleven? He’d be dragged before the dark lord, too, and either tortured into insanity or given a place on his inner council. Maybe both.

‘Overseas?’ Helen suggests. ‘Plenty of curse breakers in Egypt end up with odd… ailments, I’m sure someone there will be familiar with his condition. The Doctor will find somewhere to take him soon, then you won’t need to worry about him anymore.’

‘Yeah. The sooner the better, really. I don’t like feeling responsible for sadistic bastards like him.’

They fall silent for a moment, staring out over the library. The Eleven appears to have finally come to a decision, and as they watch, he strides towards the doors. Once he’s gone, and the room stands empty, the lighting automatically dims, leaving the place bathed in a dim orange glow, the overflowing bookshelves casting odd shadows across the floor.

It looks a bit like the Hogwarts library, Helen realises, if Madam Pince had never bothered to tidy the shelves. Despite the shadows, there’s a warmth to the place. It’s… homely. Safe. With Liv pressed against her shoulder, it’s almost possible to pretend that everything is going to be okay, that the magical world isn’t burning down just outside these walls.

Liv reaches over, slightly, and lets her fingers intertwine with Helen’s. Helen can’t quite hide her flinch, and her friend’s eyes widen.

‘You’re hurt!’ Liv grasps her wrists, gently, turning Helen’s palms over so that she can see the burns twisting up her forearms- worse on her wand arm, but clear on both, even in the weak light of the room.

‘It’s nothing’, Helen assures her. ‘Really, I’m fine. My own fault. I was trying to test some wards, reworking some Sumerian runic sequences-’

‘You should have told me’, Liv breathes, gently rolling Helen’s sleeves up to see the extent of the damage, tugging her wand out of her hand so that she can see the way the burns curl around her palm. For the first time in what feels like weeks, Helen makes no attempt to keep her grip on her wand, and lets Liv place it gently on the floor between them, drawing her legs in so that they sit facing each other, cross-legged.

Liv scowls slightly, then jabs sharply at the injuries with her own wand. Despite the sharp movement, Helen feels the diagnostic charms flowing over her forearms like water, impossibly gentle.

(Liv casts everything sharply, be it curses in the heat of battle, or household charms with barely concealed impatience, or even healing charms, fighting off injury and infection with razor-sharp precision. It’s so different to the quite literally textbook spellcasting that Helen performs, but there’s something almost exhilarating about Liv’s confidence, the way she tells her magic to do her bidding and it _listens_.)

A moment later, the diagnostic charms are replaced with the slightly uncomfortable warmth of an overpowered healing charm, and long years of untangling runic sequences and dark curses for the magical side of the British Museum has meant that Helen can feel the curse draped across her forearms writhing, desperately trying to cling to her; and she can feel Liv’s magic chasing after it, fast and powerful and vicious and alive, truly magical in a way that seven years of Hogwarts schooling never taught her.

She takes a shaky breath, once it’s done, and the heat fades. She almost finds herself missing it, but one look at the sweat shining on Liv’s forehead and the slight tremor in her hands drags her away from that line of thought quite quickly.

‘Oh, Liv, you shouldn’t have wasted your strength.’

‘Wasn’t wasted’, Liv replies instantly, despite the raggedness in her voice. ‘You know that, right?’

Helen realises, suddenly, that Liv still hasn’t let go of her wrists, and she finds that she doesn’t really want her to. ‘But if something happens-’

‘Let it’, Liv says. ‘The Doctor swears by the wards on this place, and I know you’ve been adding to them too. No one’s getting in here unless you let them. You’re keeping us safe, Helen. At least let me return the favour, okay?’

Liv trusts her. Liv, who sleeps with her wand under her pillow and throws curses as fast as the aurors do, Liv who watches even the Doctor with suspicion sometimes- Liv trusts her.

‘I’m really not doing an awful lot’, she murmurs faintly. ‘The Doctor’s right, the wards on this place could withstand anything short of an army. I haven’t changed very much, all told. Not like you do.’

‘What, throwing punches at snatchers? Anyone could do that.’

‘I couldn’t’, Helen comments. ‘Most people can’t, or won’t. You-know-who’s biggest enemy is a seventeen-year-old kid with seven years of Hogwarts’ dubious education under his belt. Cursing death eaters is far more than most people are managing right now, myself included.’

‘Don’t you go calling me a Gryffindor.’ 

‘Of course not! Us Ravenclaws have far too much house pride to let those idiots claim you.’ They’d never encountered each other at Hogwarts, somehow, something Helen will always be disappointed about. Her school years would have been insurmountably better if Liv had been there, she’s sure, dragging her away from her studies, keeping an eye out for the bullies the staff had never seen fit to deal with. Regardless of the problem’s she’d had- and Liv’s vagueness about her personal life suggests that Helen isn’t the only one whose Hogwarts years were less than ideal- they’re both Ravenclaws and proud of it, doubly so when every hero their world celebrates wore either red or green.

Part of her wants to focus on that- how the magical world dismissed both of them, because of the age of their bloodlines and the colour of their school ties, how even if the teenagers win this war they’ll probably only fix one of those- but she knows where those thoughts lead and, just like the war as a whole, there’s not a whole lot Helen can do about them. Instead, she just rests her head on Liv’s shoulder and stares out over the library again. Liv, for her part, just wraps an arm around Helen’s waist, content to watch the flickering shadows in silence.

They stay like that for a very long time.

‘There’s a new episode of Potterwatch tonight’, Helen murmurs eventually, not moving her head from Liv’s shoulder. ‘We should probably go listen.’

‘We should’, Liv replies, softly. ‘Do you want to?’

Helen pauses. It’ll be good to hear, of course, important to keep up to date on what’s happening, know who has been lost, if anyone’s seen the kids they’ve asked to fight their war for them.

‘Not really’, she admits.

‘Okay’, Liv replies. ‘Okay.’

They’ll find out tomorrow, of course. They’ll get the list of who’s dead, and they’ll try to work out who’s going to be in danger, now. Liv will head out to find them, maybe on her own, maybe with the Doctor, maybe- just maybe- all three of them together. They’ll stumble back, crash on the kitchen floor with a gaggle of terrified muggleborns and drink overbrewed tea until their hands stop shaking. Or maybe they’ll find no one at all, and they’ll spend the night creating emergency portkeys and poring over floor plans for the ministry, knowing they’ll never be used. Or, maybe, there’ll be dead bodies in hastily dug graves and Liv’s going to head for Diagon again, simmering with anger, looking for a risk to take, and Helen can only hope that she’ll come home by nightfall, with bruises and empty eyes, but alive and _here._

There’s time for that tomorrow. For now, it’s just the two of them, together in this moment before the war crashes down over them once more.


End file.
